Listen to the Requiem a Dying Star Wrote for Itself

Creative agency PARTY turned the data from a dying star into a haunting piece of music.

What requiem do you play for a dying star? Creative agency PARTY released this sparse, haunting musical arrangement based on the radio waves emitted by R Sculptoris, a red giant 1,500 light years away that was probably once a yellow dwarf, much like our own sun.

The data from the star—which has a small, distant companion—is converted into points on the disk of a music box. The star's pulses become the beats; variations in the strength of its radio waves guide how the music changes. PARTY made 70 disks at different frequencies which play the sad melody for R Sculptoris.

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The project was done in conjunction with the scientists at Atacama Large Millimeter Array, who wanted to take data from the observatory and translate it into a way people could more easily understand than raw numbers. In the process, they created a frail, pretty song for a star whose days (in cosmic terms) are numbered.